I was offered my first full-time graduate role the day I started wearing my hair out during my internship.
It wasn’t a coincidence. I know that, because my boss told me it wasn’t.
“Brunette replaced with blonde” he victoriously announced in our next staff meeting, as his sole communication that I was replacing an outgoing (female) colleague.
I was living in Milan at the time, after completing a business degree on exchange. I had wrangled an internship that required “a proficient speaker of English” to translate complex business and legal correspondence from Italian.
My boss didn’t speak English himself. So what he didn’t realise was that I actually wasn’t a “proficient” English speaker. I was exceptional.
My English skills meant I topped my year in almost every single written assignment throughout multiple degrees. They also underpinned my ability to set up a now thriving public relations agency, despite just one year of experience under my belt and no media contacts. My writing has since been published hundreds of times across Australia’s most prominent newspapers.
But I got the job because I undid my ponytail that one day.
Relaying the story to a male friend, he snickered that if I were a “real” feminist, I would refuse the job.
Except what kind of trash advice is that.
Yes, I had received the job for incredibly sexist reasons. But was I also extremely good at the job? Also yes.
Taking advantage of the disadvantage
Women are regularly granted positions or “advantages” for sexist reasons. Like the “token” woman on the otherwise all-male panel. The female voice quoted in a news story because, without her, it’s 800 words of testosterone.
Christine Holgate being handed a sinking ship, then being shoved off it anyway.
And now Sussan Ley, becoming the first woman to lead the Liberal Party after arguably its largest defeat in the history of the party, at its most unpopular time recorded.
These two examples are classic “glass cliff” scenarios, where women and other marginalised groups are appointed to leadership positions when the chance of failure is high, perpetuating the notion that they are not fit for leadership when they inevitably fail.
Ley’s glass cliff position has been commented on so much so that she herself penned an editorial in this publication, denying the whole situation.
“I couldn’t give a stuff about [glass cliffs]”, she indignantly proclaims, outlining her “focus, discipline and nerve”, and her 20 years’ serving in national parliament under three different governments “fighting hard every single day for Australians”.
“I earned my spot”, she declares! And, Ms Ley, I sincerely believe you earned it, and more.
But you are still also standing beside a glass cliff.
Opposition parties need primary votes in the 40s to be competitive, yet the Coalition’s primary vote has plummeted to an abysmal 29 percent.
It’s in such bad shape it almost fell apart over internal divisions threatening to fracture the decades-old Liberal-National alliance.
Yet Ley herself holds the highest likeability rating of any MP at net positive 11, with voters describing her as “kind” and “not as polarising as Peter Dutton”.
The problem isn’t Ley. It’s the wreckage she’s been asked to rebuild.
One must wonder if Julie Bishop was passed over for Liberal leadership in 2018 because the party was merely struggling, not in tatters like it is now.
But here’s the rub. Ley still deserves this position, just as much as Bishop deserved it so many years ago.
Because the sexist ways we are treated as women do not discount our tenacity, our experience, our expertise, or our character, just because a certain cohort can’t see past our hair or clothing or bodies. Past our gender.
Sexism will continue to exist for a long time yet. So my advice? Ignore my friend’s ridiculous suggestion to turn down a role for which I was qualified just because my boss couldn’t see it.
Instead, use it.
Make their prejudice your pathway
God knows women don’t suffer from the same superiority complexes that allow so many mediocre men to rise through the ranks and have a voice.
Any woman able to overcome the imposter syndrome that plagues our gender disproportionately is almost certainly overqualified for whatever she is putting her hand up for.
So raise your voice. Push your way into an all-male panel by pointing out to the organisers how rubbish they will look if they host a zero-diversity event. Shove your way into that news article. Point out that not considering you for a raise isn’t great optics, and don’t we have mandatory pay gaps these days?
Competent, intelligent, hardworking, creative, caring, resilient, and courageous women are constantly being looked over or doubting themselves because of sexism.
It’s not the identification of sexism that’s the problem. Pointing out a glass cliff when we see it isn’t a put down to the woman who stands precariously (and bravely) at its edge.
It’s the sexism itself that we should be telling to “get stuffed”, Ms Ley.
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